In an interview with Kevin Patrick Mahoney from Authortrek.com, Mavis Cheek revealed that the book she is currently writing is to be about Anne of Cleves:
"I'm very interested in Anne of Cleves... A). because she was rejected for her looks, and I think we're in a very lookist age, and it was probably one of the biggest rejections for looks in the world ever. I'm fascinated by the art of it, the Holbein portrait of her. And also the fact that she was reportedly dull, manic, boring, (but) she was actually clever. She came from a very dull little neck of the woods in Cleves, got the most wonderful settlement from Henry and led the life of Riley before she died. She wasn't allowed to marry, which she probably did see as a great drawback, because I think she would have wanted children, but apart from that, she lived it up. (Henry VIII) was rather fond of her in the end. So I'm trying to marry the discovery of her with a contemporary heroine, but not too on the nose - it wouldn't want make great parallels. It's very hard. I wanted to do an historical novel, but it was far too presumptuous to put words into the mouth of a real person. I couldn't do it... because it seems to me wrong. So I read about 302 books on Anne Cleves and I'm now going to do it through... Any words that are made up will be done through the mind of my heroine, my contemporary. That's my way around it. That's the theory. At the moment, my heroine is a recent widow, and although I wanted her to really rather upset about it, (she) isn't. Which is causing… some problems, on the grounds that I'm not quite sure how sympathetic she'll be to my readers, if she's quite so cavalier about her husband who's popped his clogs. I think there's an analogy there, which... you often find this in writing that you don't quite know why you're doing something, and it's only later, more or less when the book's finished, when you see the themes that have always been there, that you've been working through somehow with a vague idea. I think that's one of the exciting bits about writing when you discover parallels you didn't know you knew. Like the Brunel thing where my character in “Patrick Parker” dumps one woman for a better type of wife for him. Which is exactly what Brunel, Patrick's great hero, did."
To read the rest of the interview, please visit:
http://www.authortrek.com/mavis_cheek_interview.html
For more Mavis Cheek information, including a bibliography, links to articles and interviews, please visit:
http://www.authortrek.com/mavis_cheek_page.html
